COLOMBO, Sri Lanka – Sri Lanka's army chief on Wednesday dismissed
as "doctored" a video clip that shows soldiers shooting bound,
blindfolded prisoners and abusing corpses in the final days of the
country's 26-year civil war.
A U.N. expert,
Christof Heyns, concluded this week the 5-minute, 25-second video was
authentic and contains enough evidence to open a war crimes
investigation, but asked Sri Lanka to investigate the events first.
Army
Commander Lt. Gen. Jagath Jayasuriya told reporters Thursday there are
no clear details available on the video on the persons involved, place
and day of the killings.
"We have said it's a doctored video," Jayasuriya said.
"These
are general statements," he said of the allegations. "If somebody says
so and so did this at this place and this day and time, we can find
answers to that."
Heyns, a South African law
professor who is also the U.N.'s independent investigator on
extrajudicial killings, said that he viewed the video frame by frame
with a team of technical and forensic specialists to determine it was
authentic.
In the video, several men lie on a
muddy track, bound and motionless. Another man is shown being forced to
sit upright by a soldier in camouflage carrying a rifle. Another
soldier steps up behind and shoots him in the back of the head, point
blank. The prisoner slumps sideways as the camera pans across the road
revealing nine bodies, most of them naked, with gunshot wounds clearly
visible.
The uniformed men then force another
blindfolded prisoner down into the dirt. A gunshot rings out and he,
too, jerks and collapses. Later, the camera focuses on a young man, his
skull blown open. Soldiers stand over the half-dressed corpse of a
woman, gloating.
A partial U.N. count showed at
least 7,000 ethnic Tamil civilians killed in the last five months of
the conflict and relatives say a number of rebels surrendered or
arrested at the end of the fighting are unaccounted for.
Also
a U.N experts panel has said it has found credible allegations that
serious human rights abuses took place in the final months of the civil
war conducted away from public scrutiny, after evicting the U.N,
independent reporters and aid workers.
The
report said that government forces targeted civilians, hospitals and
blocked food and medicine for hundreds of thousands of civilians
trapped in the war zone and deliberately undercounted the number of
civilians in the conflict zone.
It also alleged
Tamil Tiger rebels recruited child soldiers, held civilians as human
shields and shot dead those tried to escape their grip.
The government has repeatedly denied the allegations and the rebels are virtually nonexistent as an organization to respond.
U.N
has estimated between 80,000 to 100,000 people may have been killed in
the civil war but human rights groups say the number could be much
higher.
